The River of January

Happy New Year everybody!! What a way to start it! Rio has been absolutely amazing start to finish! Where do we begin?!!

The first crisis of the trip happened straight away! We attempted to take some money out at rio airport and the machine ate my card and wouldn't release it! After appropriate use of the the F and C words (sorry nan!) I managed to pull the thing out unscathed using brute strength! Whist queuing for a more friendly ATM we watched on as 3 different girls came unstuck the same way! The panic on their faces was like something off of 'Beadles About'! Luckily for them 'Harry the Redeemer' was on hand to show them the secret technique for saving their trip! Good karma points for our trip successfully accumulated!

So we got to the hostel.... A 9 bed dorm on the edge of a favela... We were shown to our room which consists of three sets of three tiered bunk beds in a room no bigger than the average lounge! .....Fake smiles are exchanged in an attempt to reassure each other! The room is full of brazilians and one German bird and the whole place is very quiet! I must admit I was thinking "what are we doing here? what was I thinking!!" But Nicola reassured me that this wouldn't be the worst place we would stay and I felt loads better! Haha! We've since found it's been quite nice, the breakfast is decent and the staff have been pretty helpful! One big draw back has been the location, hence my next story!

The first day we decided to go exploring by foot and walked from lagoa, where our hostel is, to both ipanema and copacabana beach. This turned out to be a very very long way away! We found the streets to be very safe and didn't feel uneasy at any point. The only negative was the fact that walking, what turned out to be a half marathon, in flip flops gave me some serious golf ball sized blisters! We checked out the beaches and saw all the preparations for New Years and, after returning to our hostel to get ready, headed back down to Copacabana for New Years (more walking as no cabs or buses were allowed to go down to copacabana that night). Once there it was immense! The atmosphere was incredible. It had a real festival feel about it with music stages and gazebos everywhere. Over 1 million people were on the beach. It was crazy! The fireworks were the best we have ever seen (unfortunately we are having trouble loading the video to this site). We watched them in awe whilst a group of Brazilian guys coated us in champagne! It's safe to say we had an incredible night!

The next morning, to our amazement, everyone we spoke to in our hostel seemed massively traumatised by the whole experience! They said they feared for their lives at times! Myself and Nicola both agreed that clearly they have never been to a west ham v millwall game or a night out at zinc in Southend! We chilled the rest of the day and randomly managed to find the west ham game on in a bar in ipanema (good karma paying off!). Nicola wasn't interested so instead watched the world go by and noticed that at 38 degrees we were by far the sweatiest people in brazil!! She has also developed a new sense of pride over her curvatious behind and keeps getting the urge to shake it along with all the thong clad brazilians that are ten a penny!! We had a lovely Brazilian BBQ at a restaurant our hostel recommended. Since it was all you can eat our coasters stayed on the green 'keep feeding me' side for a very long time!

Today we had an excursion which took us into the jungle with a few picturesque stop overs followed by 'Christ the Redeemer' and lunch in Lapa near to the steps where snoop dogg filmed the video for 'beautiful' (see pictures). We met some really fun people from all over (India, Scotland, holland, Italy and San Francisco). Lapa had a really good bohemian vibe and we had a great day!

Tomorrow we head to the paradise island of 'illha grande' for some downtime and sun worshipping (mainly for Nicola... I'll probably be building sand castles!)

We hope you enjoy the photos :)

Harry & Nicola

p.s. for all those who love a game of cards (specifically s***head) me and Nicola have decided to compete against each other for the whole 6 months for the 'Copa Del s***head' trophy. Every blog with have a score update at the bottom.

Copa Del s***head score: NH 4 - 4 HF

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